As I was in my “Advanced data management” class today I realized that CodingHorror aka Jeff Atwood of stackoverflow fame agree quite alot with Apache H-base. Apache H-base is a column-store database system based on the Google BigTable ideas leveraging Apache Hadoop.

Jeff Atwood was is not very happy with the default “incredibly pessimistic out of the box” setup of databases in his “Deadlocked!” post.  Along the same lines, the H-store people published an article[1]:

The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite).

They claim that the time is up for “legacy systems” like the model used by current RDMBS’ like MySQL and SQL Server. The assumption of the H-base people that reasonates with Jeff Atwood – I believe – is:

Every effort should be made to eliminate the cost of traditional dynamic locking for concurrency control, which will also be a bottleneck.

I don’t know if it is something Jeff Atwood is aware of, and I don’t know if that is a sign that a traditional RDBMS is maybe not what he wants, but it is worth think about – IMHO.

[1]Stonebraker, M., Madden, S., Abadi, D. J., Harizopoulos, S., Hachem, N., Helland, P., 2007. The end of an architectural era: (it’s time for a complete rewrite). In: VLDB ’07: Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Very large data bases. VLDB Endowment, pp. 1150-1160. URL:http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1325981 pdf – Bibtex